No matter how hard you concentrate and how far you extend your pineal gland, Siri can only understand what you say to it, not read your mind? But what if it could?

That question is no longer a hypothetical. The guys behind Project Black Mirror have just figured out a way to imbue Siri with telepathic abilities… kind of.

Using a home-built rig made up of an Arduino prototyping platform, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 4S and ECG pads to help capture the subject’s analog brain waves, the Project Black Mirror hackers have figured out a way to turn brain waves into synthesized speech which is then input into Siri using the microphone jack.

In the video above, all the guys manage to do is place a call using Siri. I suspect that there isn’t much psychic grammar being used here, and that you can’t just think to Siri that you’d like to call your mother without first programming the MacBook Pro interpreter to understand the entire brain wave as “call my mother.”

Still, this project is in the very earliest stages of development, so possibly, given enough time, Siri will be able to do more complicated tasks, like Wolfram Alpha calculations, just by thinking them at it. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have that ability in the iPhone 5?

About the author:

John Brownlee is a Contributing Editor. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.

FriarNurgle

Golf clap.

David Clark

Hmm. I would like to see it do something other than ‘call’. With that said, this is NUTS!

IGetIt

This is a fraud. The SpeakJet chip is not wired up to anything at all (the way it is positioned on the prototyping board merely shorts out all the pins) and doesn’t sound at all like what is recorded. There are lots of other reasons to be suspicious but as someone who has actually designed circuits using the SpeakJet the above is sufficient for me to reject this claimed project.

Dustinbm

Fake

Anon

Pretending it failed for you on the first try and then magically worked on the second. That was a bit lame guys!

sault

Its almost offensive…

Demonstr8r

To think that a writer at COM doesn’t present at least an ounce of skepticism boogles the mind.

ImTrollButHonest

Good joke. :) (haha why are some people taking them seriously ? haha)

SulaymanF

Even if improperly soldered, the entire idea is plausible and technically feasible (although it’s a sorta Rube Goldberg idea in a way)

baby_Twitty

i’ve watched the videos, and obviously its fake as hell…

John brownlee you have succeeded in failing again.

Bruce

Whether this is true or not, the idea is very exciting. I hope it inspires more people to work on the idea. I can imagine placing small wireless electrodes on myself one day to interface with my Mac. Perhaps even implants that lie just under the skin.

Futurist7490

Whether or not this is true, it is certainly on someone’s mind which makes it possible for the future. Remember there would no computers, electric lights, no lots of things except for ideas. It would make a lot of people clean up their thoughts, and make for a better world.

Geoff_mackellar

This is definitely feasible and real hardware has been on the market for years. See http://www.emotiv.com or search Youtube for Emotiv EPOC + Neurophone